Relocation, Northern Norway | Now it’s serious
It is code red for Northern Norway.
Comment This is a comment, written by an editorial staff member. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitudes.
Recently had I had the pleasure of traveling slowly from Grense Jakobselv to Vardø, a distance of just over 300 kilometers.
The nature is spectacular, the finest Norway has to offer. But it gives it a feeling of driving along a continuous burial for the northern Norwegian villages. I have been here a lot, now it is clear that the changes are happening faster than anyone could have imagined years ago.
Places there only 10-15 years ago was life and a school and a convenience store, the lights have been turned off. In most places, they are only switched on again when the summer guests come from the south.
Winter has come in Finnmark, in the bare landscape the snow fountains are unpacking at the front doors of empty houses along the Varangerfjord. This is a part of Norway with a profitable business community, and a formidable potential for value creation based on enormous rich natural resources. It’s just that the young people are leaving here. Finnmark loses big in the battle for inhabitants and settlement.
Then you can wonder why the security policy alarm has not gone off in the border area against a great power. The most important form of strategic assertion has traditionally been what is now lost, settlement, a stable population. There was a thought behind it all: NRK’s first district office outside Oslo was once located in Vadsø. Today it is closed.
The demographic warning lights have been flashing for a long time, not only in Finnmark, but throughout northern Norway.
And fresh reportage in Nordlys shows that this is not something that is going to happen, it is already happening. Closest to our eyes, rural communities are being emptied of people. Some of the smallest municipalities have not had a single child birth in recent years. UiT professor Kjell Arne Røvik talks about the fact that we are a few years away from a situation where an aging and dying population must be taken care of by labor that commutes in with the North Sea rotation. For many municipalities, it will be completely impossible to offer the service alone.
Many of us who love Northern Norway feel both sadness and powerlessness when the writing is so clearly on the wall. It is part of our identity that is put to the test when known landscapes are dissolved.
Then we must remember that the changes in the settlement pattern is not something that only takes place with us. Urbanization is a global trend.
Ultimately, the development will also affect the cities in northern Norway. We are already seeing tendencies towards flattening in Tromsø. When the surrounding area around the cities has been emptied, the move must come from another place.
But the political situation understanding of what is happening, and the consequences of them, are frighteningly weak. The political measures are few and far between. Much is about symbols and individual cases, without superstructure or holistic thinking. A county boundary and a college on Nesna are fine, but it is a mouse piss in the Barents Sea. And although Støre and Vedum have long created the impression that almost everyone in the districts travels by ferry, it is far from reality.
It is still something conciliatory over resorting to easy rhetoric when one knows how strong the opposing forces are. The loudest whining in public today does not come from the districts, but from Oslo, where all power is concentrated.
Even the slightest tendency to shift in perspective or use of resources in the state budget leads to the city council, national politicians and commentators in the capital triggering outcries and lamentations.
A change has taken place in the political culture in Norway. We no longer have a confident capital, but a capital where opinion leaders are increasingly increasing and seem to feel threatened by the districts. The cries for Han Stat today are strongest in Oslo, they drown out the districts.
The story of the districts as a winner in the state budget game is false no matter how many times it is repeated. Among other things, the principles of “societal benefit” in the transport sector have contributed to this. It has built the country systematically down, not up. The big money always goes where most people live.
Næringslivsavisen Nordnorsk Rapport writes in the latest issue that Northern Norway will receive 26 of NOK 1,200 billion in the next National Transport Plan. That is, to a percentage of the funds of nine percent of the population and the country’s most profitable business!
It is true something to think about. The skewed distribution has been systematic for several decades. Just take a trip on the E6 over Hamarøy or a county road on Senja and test it out yourself. In northern Norway, the neglects on county roads have sent the backlog up to NOK 20 billion. In addition, government contributions to urban packages in the north are negligible compared to some cities in the south.
The question is what the nation wants with Northern Norway, if there is any will behind the party speeches. Some will say that one is faced with a choice of path, that it is either the cities or the villages, that there is an end to the time where you can live where you want, and expect the same service offer from the community.
The answer may lie somewhere in the middle. Something can obviously be changed by stopping cannibalization in fisheries and agriculture. The one that has led to the fishing villages being evacuated and small farms being closed down at a frightening pace. Pasture grows again and the topsoil is fallow. In many places, however, there is great hope in building a bridge to tourism with experiences, animal husbandry and short-distance food.
Elsewhere, the green shift offers enormous industrial opportunities and green energy. But how do you resolve the escalating conflicts over land use, not least with reindeer husbandry?
The time is ripe for strengthening of the cities in the north. There are a number of strong knowledge environments on which it will be entirely possible to build. The successes with the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø and the Civil Aviation Authority of Bodø could have been a good script. There was the political courage and will behind it.
But the Labor Party’s cowardice in such matters makes it difficult to move forward. The party has bowed its neck to LO and the state bureaucracy, and refuses to move a single state enterprise out of Oslo, even though it would of course be an advantage for the capital as well because housing prices could be sent down. It must also be allowed to remind that so far it is not enshrined in Norwegian law that almost the entire large jungle of directorates, foundations, institutes and inspections must be located in a single city.
It’s serious now. And there is no time to lose. The government should, in collaboration with northern Norwegian and national strategies, create new policies and a credible development plan for northern Norway, and provide resources to reverse the trend through credible instruments.
The first to have a seat at the table are people with a combination of political insight and genuine commitment to the region. Nothing of faith in the future can be built on slogans and activism. Self-understanding is needed in combination with depth. It would not be stupid to start by clearing space for a Victor Normann, a Rune Rafaelsen and a Karl Eirik Schjøtt Pedersen.
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